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Q and A: Why is my CMS based website only ranking for the Home Page?

We have put our hotel website into Joomla CMS and I notice with our CMS based sites that the home page ranks well but most other pages say ‘Currently not ranked by Google.’ I know they have been indexed by Google, and have internal links pointing to them, yet they are not achieving any ranking despite having relevant succinct copy on them. Any ideas as to why there might be a problem? i don’t see any spam links pointing to them…

Many thanks

Sarah

Hi Sarah,

The most popular Content Management Systems (such as Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress) are reasonably search engine friendly with their default settings – although all can be tweaked to improve their SEO capabilities. There are a variety of plugins/modules available for each of these open source CMSs and it is usually worth talking to your SEO or Web Developer to see what can be done to make your site more search engine friendly.

As you say, many (if not all) of the pages on your site [URL Provided] are indexed by Google. When you say you get the message “Currently not ranked by Google”, presumably you are using rank checking software to see how your site ranks for a variety of keyword phrases. This simply indicates that the pages you are checking are not ranking in the top “X” search results – for the keyword phrases you have identified. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they are not rankling for other keywords. I suggest that you review your analytics data to see which pages are being found on search engines(and for which keyword phrases).

It is typical for a website’s home page to rank better than it’s sub pages – this is largely because the home page usually has significantly more links to it from external sites. In order to improve the rankings of your sub-pages (assuming that the page structure and content has already been optimised for the target keywords)., you should work at building backlinks to these pages – ideally using your target keyword phrases as anchor text.

The Link profile for your site is fairly basic – with relatively few links from external sites – and most all of these appear to be going to the Home Page. Undertaking a link building campaign is likely to improve your overall rankings – and also balance your rankings better between your home and sub-pages.

As another SEO person out in the world trying to help sites ‘Get Google’ie’, I have noticed that Joomla, WordPress and related content management systems have plugins with defaults to internal pages of a meta tag: robots: no index, no follow or a do not archive tag. That means your internal pages will not show up because you asked them not to. Be sure that if you have an SEO or other meta tag plugin that you understand how to use the settings and that the toggles in your code are set to be SE friendly. Then do everything that Kalena says. Hope this helps.